


The Closet Scene

by fightingfairywoman



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: BTVS s2e3, Closeted Character, Cordelia Chase - Freeform, Cordelia Chase/Willow Rosenberg - Freeform, Cordelia/Willow - Freeform, F/F, First Kiss, First and Only Kiss, Las Vegas rules, Literally in the closet, Missing Scene, School Hard, Trapped In A Closet, What-If, Willow Rosenberg - Freeform, Willow Rosenberg/Cordelia Chase - Freeform, Willow/Cordelia - Freeform, idk how many tags are useful in making fics searchable if the ship is already listed?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 03:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14299794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingfairywoman/pseuds/fightingfairywoman
Summary: "What do we do now?"Eyes wide, brows twitching nervously, she suggested, "Pray?"What happens in the utility closet during a vampire raid, stays in the utility closet during a vampire raid.(Takes place during s2e3 - School Hard.)





	The Closet Scene

“Ugh! That’s ridiculous.” Cordelia stood up and huffed. She turned, wringing her hands, staring up the walls, then turned back around with a noise of frustration. “Why would we pray?”

“Well, do you normally pray?” Willow ventured, not really sure if there was any point to this conversation, but talking was better than just waiting.

“No, I normally - ” Cordelia rolled her eyes and sat again. “I just wait for things to work out. It normally does … it just normally takes some involvement from Nerdsville P.D. - no offence - ”

“None taken,” Willow mumbled under her breath, raising her eyebrows.

“ - and then maybe I listen to Giles for as long as I can without dying of total boredom, and then _something_ happens, and it all … works out.” She crossed her legs and put her head in one hand, her manicured fingers massaging her forehead. “I guess that’s what’s going to happen this time. It better, anyway, or I’m going to send Buffy the invoice for the pre-paid stylist appointment I’ll be missing tomorrow morning. God, she never even paid for the last one!”

“And if she can’t?” Willow said, one corner of her lip quirking up humorlessly. “I mean, what if she doesn’t make it out eith - ”

She silenced herself and averted her eyes. She’d been trying to carry on the largely-meaningless chatter, occupying them just as well as anything else could, but with some classic foot-in-mouth-itis she’d managed to cross a line she didn’t even know would be there. Cordelia looked away, clearing her throat awkwardly. Willow ducked her head, wishing she could ostrich her way out of the closet entirely.

“Well, we’re only talking medium-case scenario here,” Cordelia said eventually. “Like if the Fang Gang clears out but we stay stuck in here for some undoable length of time.”

Willow nodded. “So I guess in that … scenario … Buffy would be out of here too, but not until we’d all missed our hair appointments?”

“Please.” Cordelia rolled her eyes. “As if you have hair appointments.”

Willow tucked her hands together between her knees, staring off to one side, with only a soft “hmm” of recognition for Cordelia’s lack of caring on the whole tactfulness front. They might be dying in a few hours or minutes or seconds, but it wouldn’t be fair to expect that to change the habits of a lifetime.

To her surprise, though, she noticed after a moment that Cordelia was no longer scoffing at her but was instead leaning forward, elbows on her knees, head tilted back and trying not to let her lip tremble. She took a deep breath as though she was about to say something, then stopped. Willow’s shoulders tensed; then she shifted, facing a little more towards the fidgeting, overdressed figure in front of her. (Seriously, who needed to do their hair like that for a parent-teacher night? And did her shirt need to be that shiny? The light totally caught on her - whatever. It just wasn’t needed, was the point.) She chewed her lip, frowning at Cordy, and tried to think of something else to say.

Fortunately, Cordelia spared her.

“I just don’t want this to be my last time hostage-ing myself in a closet somewhere while a … bunch of bumpy _bitches_ battle Buffy,” she said.

“Nice alliteration.”

“Nice a-little-what-shin? Whatever, you know what I meant. Obviously, the primo goal is to never get locked in a cramped space with you or any of your other creepy Scooby Dupes ever again, but since that doesn’t seem likely in this place … ” Cordelia sighed. “ … I guess I’d rather do this again than do nothing at all.”

Surprisingly deep, Willow thought to herself, but she decided wisely not to say so. If Cordelia was listening, it might not help.

“I don’t want to die in this closet,” Cordelia burst out suddenly. “I haven’t even kissed anyone in forever! How sad is that?”

“I haven’t kissed anyone in, well, ever,” Willow said, then widened her eyes. “Wait. Did I say that out loud? Why did I say that out loud?!”

Cordelia was staring at her, mouth open. “Oh my god,” she said. “You guys really are the most socially impaired team of demon-punchers I’ve ever met.”

Willow’s cheeks were burning. “Like you’ve met a lot?”

There was a pregnant pause. Weird saying, Willow thought to herself, pretending that her heart wasn’t speeding up. Who gets a pause pregnant? Was it some kind of euphemism for pent-up tension, or … no. She cringed internally, nipping off that bud of thought before it went anywhere bad. Like her other ones had sometimes been doing.

She wanted to clear her throat, but that might be too obviously subject-changey in attempted nature. Instead she just let her cheeks burn, while trying not to look at Cordelia’s cheeks. Or think about them too hard. Previous experience had shown that it could lead to the formation of ideas like “you could bludgeon a man to death with those cheekbones” in her head, and seeing that as something good - okay, not just good, but hot - was probably very non-normal in the platonic barely-even-acquaintance department. 

Still lost in this train of not-thoughts (because these should not be thoughts!), Willow didn’t notice straight away that Cordelia had shifted to face her, the light catching the shiny fabric over her … yeah. Okay. She was doing the noticing now. It was probably a bad thing that it took chest-movements to get her attention, but that could go right in with the other should-not-be-thoughts, and even if she looked up she would still be staring right at those soft open lips and deep eyes framed by the blunt-force deadly bludgeony cheekbones and - oh.

She drew back as though she’d been burned.

Cordelia’s eyes were shining a little now. Willow hadn’t seen her cry before, not really, and this was scary and new on top of the whole vampires-raiding-the-parent-teacher-night thing. She gulped, feeling her heartbeat tumbling along clumsily in her chest, and tried to mentally rewind to what they had been saying before, when Cordelia had been saying that she … that the kissing, and the … maybe dying closet hostage thing … what was it? She had to remember, she had -

Oh.

Never mind.

Everything had gone flat and weird, which first made Willow think they’d gotten some kind of dizzy-making spell residue in here from something going on outside, maybe something Giles and Buffy were trying to fight off the, what did Cordelia call them, fang gang? But then she realized that it was probably just what happens when you keep your eyes open while someone else has their mouth on your mouth. Their mouth on - wow. _Wow._ Her eyes widened, but that was kind of making everything blurrier, so she closed them instead; her head kept spinning, but at least she didn’t have to see it. She could just feel it instead.

What she felt was soft, and radiating glowy waves outwards, and almost sort of prickling like pins and needles. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her lips. Or was it Cordelia’s pulse? This was not something she’d ever had to think about before. Whose heartbeat do you feel in your mouth when you kiss? Is it just you wigging, or is it an actual cardiovascular thing of some kind? Was it normal to be this thought-racy when being kissed? Maybe it would change if she kissed back. It was worth trying. Probably.

It definitely helped with _something_. The pounding heart thing stopped feeling so important, and instead, Willow just felt some kind of ... tide ... rising up in her. It hovered along the way in places she would definitely not be thinking about later, and up in the face area where she sort of felt like she was melting. Without really thinking about why, she brought her arms up and around Cordelia and pulled her closer. Apparently, for some reason, this was the cue for something tongue-related to start happening, and wow. There was no way she was complaining about that. Especially when Cordelia followed up with hands sliding around to the small of her back, which sent another warm pulse to the places she was trying very hard not to acknowledge as having a worrying level of sensation-increasing. A shiver down her spine was heading that way too, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. They could die at pretty much any time, so she might as well just give in to Cordelia and her, her lips, and her stupid shiny shirt, and stop worrying about how interested she was in the contents of said shirt, cause the worrying could wait for later, assuming they didn’t get killed first, which maybe might be a plus at this point if it meant not having to get to the worrying part but also a minus because it would mean no more Cordelia kissage and since when was that her main priority for not dying? Since Cordelia’s fingers brushed up under the hem of Willow’s skirt, probably, and Willow realized that tights did not stop hands from feeling really good on her skin.

Her mind kept racing, but when Cordelia’s fingertips, with their ostentatious manicure and their really disturbingly nice softness and surprising warmth and they were pressing into her thigh and the mind-raciness didn’t matter so much because the thoughts were getting all incoherent and _wow_ this was good! They could still die in a few minutes but now it actually didn’t matter anymore, it would be like going out on a morphine cloud or a, a roller coaster high or, or - 

All of a sudden Willow’s mouth felt very cold. The hand on her thigh withdrew, leaving what felt like burning fingerprints and a sudden metallic prickle all through her chest as her eyes refocused and her head swam. Cordelia was suddenly as far away as she could get in the cramped-ness of the closet, and Willow didn’t know where this was going but it did not feel like it would be somewhere good. Her face felt numb and something really unpleasant was roiling inside of her, and it looked like maybe Cordelia was feeling it too. A spell, she thought wildly. Some kind of ward, or enchantment, or something maybe Giles had set up somehow, at some point, to make people safe when they were hiding from gangs of wild vampires in closets in a school on the Hellmouth by distracting them and making them not want to leave said closets, or maybe that was insane and she was just rationalising and was she saying this out loud?

“Um,” Cordelia said, clearing her throat. “That was … um. What do you think that was?”

Oh thank god, she hadn’t been saying it out loud. Her face was still on fire, though, which she wished she could pretend was a Hellmouth thing (hellfire, was hellfire a thing?) but her guts were telling her that it really, really wasn’t. Dang guts. Shut up, guts, she squeaked internally, feeling her forehead and eyebrows twist into each other like they were trying to get away from her face completely.

“I think … that was a perfectly normal thing that happens to two fr - uh, acquaintances, two comrades in the fight against the demonic forces, even if one of them is kind of not volunteering for it, when they’re hiding from evil people-eating vampires in a, a closet,” she said breathlessly, trying not to trip over her words and kind of doing okay with it, maybe. “Totally completely normal. A brain chemistry thing, probably, with the adrenaline and the noradrenaline and maybe a bit of dopameang - uh, dopamine - or uh, oxy … oxytocin? It’s perfectly scientifically explainable. Just your basic biology error. Glitch. Thing.”

Cordelia actually succeeded in crossing her arms now. Or at least, kind of folding them around herself, shrinking backwards but maybe holding the folded arms a little tight around the shiny shirt and emphasizing the - nothing. Emphasizing nothing.

“Okay, some of those words you used are definitely made up, because I got an A in chemistry and they sound like the kind of Giles-esque BSing you guys do when you’re panicked, but if there’s Oxy involved, we should probably try to forget this because my cousin just got busted for selling that stuff and let me tell you, it does not go down well with college applications,” Cordelia said. She'd untucked her arms from around her stupid shiny shirt but she kept making sort of halfway gestures like going to cross them again and then jerking them back down to her sides, or pressing her manicured soft warm fingers - no, no, it’s just the adrenaline talking, focus, Willow, focus! - into part of a fist and then releasing them. “Do you have a cell phone? Because we could really use a cell phone right now. I don’t have Buffy’s number, but I bet you remember it from all your Scooby rendezvous-ing, right? We can call and see if anyone’s back yet! I can’t hear anything outside, anyway. Can you? Hear anything outside? I can’t.”

She turned around, then seemed to pause when she realized she was facing a blank wall.

“What were you saying before?” Willow said after a moment. “About what we could do?”

“I didn’t say anything!” Cordelia said quickly, whirling back around. “You said something, didn’t you?”

Willow’s face heated up again. “Oh. Yeah,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “About, uh…”

“Praying,” Cordelia prompted, raising her eyebrows. She dropped to her knees and for a second Willow’s whole body did something she really, really didn’t want to think about later. “So, how do you normally do it?”

It seemed like the wrong time to say that she’d never had her Bat Mitzvah. Willow cleared her throat.

“I think you just do what feels natural.”


End file.
